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Contact center planning with Interaction Decisions™

Use contact center forecasting to enhance the customer experience.

Organizations are investing millions of dollars to improve the customer experience. They are offering special sales and servicing programs, providing multi-lingual agents, investing in new technologies, and presenting a wider diversity of products and solutions.

These servicing strategies are tied to an unprecedented number of customer contact points – inbound phone/outbound/email/chat/social. Consistent customer service delivery is a serious challenge. So is planning for it.

Interaction Decisions™ is an agent capacity planning and analysis platform designed for contact centers. Based on analytic capability, this robust and flexible call center planning solution optimizes contact center resources and performance in order to get the right number of agents, in the right place, at the right time, to deliver exceptional service. It is strategic planning that helps determine important considerations.

How do you know what your call volume will be? And how to manage seasonality?

How do you know when you should hire new agents? Or use overtime?

What service level standard is most profitable to use for premium customers? And for which skills? In which contact center?

How do you deliver consistent service across seasonal peaks and valleys? And at least cost?

Solving for these business challenges is complex. With Interaction Decisions, it will be easier, faster, and more accurate. And your customers will be happier for it.

Analyze for insights.

A myriad of variables impact the contact center’s customer service strategy and performance efficiency. Interaction Decisions makes accounting for those variables considerably easier.

With its built-in automated analytic engine, Interaction Decisions can solve even the most complicated staffing and strategic planning problems quickly and with pin-point accuracy. The ability to make a split-second decision is paramount when dealing with today’s more connected customer.

Be ready with plan A - and prepared for plans B and C.

Know how many service agents you need before a new marketing event takes place. Provide supervisors with options for any given change in the operation or business strategy.

Set proper goals.

Fine-tune service goals to determine the most profitable or appropriate service standard.

Make an impact with contact center forecasting.

Predict all critical planning metrics such as call volume, handle time, attrition rate, wage rate, and first call resolution - from two weeks to multiple years out.

Understand budget and operation performance.

Let your data help you win more customers.

Contact centers generate a wealth of customer interaction data. Service consistency and operational efficiency are the keystones of a high-functioning contact center operation. Those with access to clean, organized, readily-available data win with more timely and accurate business analysis.

At its core, Interaction Decisions has a data mart designed to consolidate data from the ACD, WFM, payroll, email, chat, back office, and casework systems. This data is organized and validated for use in analysis and reporting.

Upgrade to Interaction Decisions 3.9 for new and enhanced capabilities.

Interaction Decisions 3.9 includes new features that help capacity planning analysts create a more efficient contact center, and by doing so - improve the customer experience. If you are an existing customer, simply put in a request with support to acquire these enhanced features. New customers can work through their account manager to get started.

Use email and casework to your advantage.

Interaction Decisions 3.9 email and casework features enable management of back-office workload using contact center simulation modeling to predict future staffing outcomes. Users can set timeframe defaults to help calculate scheduling over hours or days instead of shorter intervals – and account for peaks and valleys in staffing.

The methodology used includes “steady state staffing,” which calculates the least number of agents needed to handle a steady load of emails and casework. The result is a balanced plan that considers both service and occupancy goals.

Users will also benefit by being able to forecast and plan back-office email and casework assignments with improved accuracy.

Put customer experience metrics to work for benefits across the board.

Use detailed customer experience data to achieve transparency into customer behavior based on seasonal differences. This data can then be used to increase service levels and identify actionable strategies for hiring at each center.

Add up to 10 custom metrics, and import customer feedback data to get a week-over-week view of customer interaction scores – and determine forecasting and training needs.

Reduce expenses with contact center planning.

By developing a service strategy that staffs exactly to contact center demand, you ensure consistent service quality as well as operational and financial efficiency. An optimized plan outlines the agent capacity you need to achieve service level goals and reduces expenses.

Use accurate requirements for call center capacity planning.

Accurately predict the required number of customer service agents necessary – by week, month, or multiple years. This accounts for improved:

Multi-skill efficiency

Expected average speed of answer

Service level goals

Abandon rates

Occupancy

First call resolution

Customer satisfaction score

Quality score

Net Promoter Score (NPS®)

Staff exactly to service level.

Interaction Decisions' “just-in-time” hiring and overtime algorithms make sure agents are available exactly when they are needed. Supervisors will know precisely when, where, and how many agents to hire. This accounts for:

Seasonal contact volumes

Productivity differences across centers

Agent learning curves

Shrinkage and attrition forecasts

Use controllable shrinkage productively.

Vacation, breaks, training, and overtime/undertime can be used to fill gaps in the overall staffing strategy.